Is Usama BinLaden a Cthulhu Cultist?

Since September 11th, a surprising amount of evidence has been brought forward to suggest that the international terrorist Usama BinLaden is in fact a servant of the Great Old Ones. Many people have taken his supposed stance as an Islamic Fundamentalist at face value, and have been unable or unwilling to percieve the unwholesome mysteries which lie beyond.

The Cult That Will Never Die

Lovecraft described the motivations of the servants of the Great Old Ones as devoted to chaos and destruction, the kind of which the Al'Qaida-trained terrorists seem to enjoy. "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstacy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return." The Call of Cthulhu by H.P.Lovecraft

It is worth noting that the primary role of the Al'Qaida in Afghanistan was to train cultist fanatics to destroy western civilization by using modern technology against itself. It is this role of teaching efficient abuses of technology leading to the end of civilization which is a theme in much of Lovecraft's writings about the Cult. One particularly notable instance is in his his prose-poem Nyarlathotep, where the named avatar of cosmic oblivion takes the human form of an arabic mystic who demonstrates the power of forbidden lore using projected images and energy on a lecture tour. Though the method is not specified, the general influence of Nyarlathotep in various cities led to widespread nightmares, panic, madness, racial strife, and eventually the cities being blown to shards and forcing their abandonment. The parallels between BinLaden and Nyarlathotep's roles are uncanny.

In the Shining Trapezohedron trilogy of stories' conclusion, The Shadow From The Steeple by Robert Bloch, an avatar of Nyarlathotep seeks the power of the atom bomb to destroy civilization and return the planet to the keeping of the Great Old Ones. In fact, in the poem-cycle The Fungi From Yuggoth, Nyarlathotep is prophecized to use nuclear power to "blow earth's dust away." As many of us have observed, Usama BinLaden has claimed to possess some form of atomic weapon and has threatened to use it, albeit as a retaliatory measure. Though the verity of this is in question, it is widely reported that the holy grail of Al'Qaida has been to possess and deploy atomic weapons in American cities.

Al'Qaida and the Cthulhu Cult, are both are secret organizations dedicated to widespread slaughter and destruction of modern civilization, to bring back a nearly-forgotten golden age where mankind knew its role as dutiful servants of the Divine. Islam itself means submission; and a fundamentalistic interpretation declares absolute cultish obedience. Both Al'Qaida and the Cthulhu Cult are international multi-ethnic organizations, with pockets appearing in the shadows of urban blight across the planet; worshipping in secret, plotting our demise. Though much of these cults are comprised of the poor outcasts of the world, desperate for some kind of nihilistic meaning in their lives, a few educated persons have used their sinister knowledge to infiltrate and destroy our culture from within.

The Mad Arab

Fascinatingly, the histories of Usama BinLaden and the author of the Necronomicon, the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred are strikingly similar albeit seperated by centuries. Both were natives of Yemen, who then travelled to Saudi Arabia where they had dramatic revelations. For BinLaden it appears to have been a rejection of secularism, but for Alhazred it was him wandering the Rub Al'Khali desert and discovering the lost city of Irem. During his visit of Irem, Alhazred began supplementing his worship of Allah with that of Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and Azathoth. This "city of pillars" was almost mythological, but was recently discovered by archaeologists around the time that BinLaden began to embrace his strange new beliefs.

From this we might well derive that Usama BinLaden either has followed the path of Alhazred and reached similar conclusions, or more likely that he is attempting to fulfil a forgotten prophecy of Alhazred's ressurection or reincarnation. Alhazred relocated to Syria after his sanity-shattering experiences in Saudi Arabia, where he penned a book of forbidden poetry called Al'Azif, later known as the Necronomicon. This book is understood to contain cryptic instructions, incantations, and prophecies within its verses.

If this is any indication, we will soon see Usama BinLaden in Syria. Not coincidentally perhaps, Syria is a nuclear power.

The Waxen Mask, The Robe That Hides

A most disturbing development appeared in the more recent videotape releases displaying Usama BinLaden, appearing sickly-pale, wearing voluminous robes and turban, concealing entirely one of his arms, suspiciously stiff, immobile and expressionless, and speaking in a strange whisper. This theme appears numerous times throughout Lovecraft's stories, including The Festival, Beyond The Gates of The Silver Key, and most infamously The Whisperer In Darkness.

We all know what it means; the old body of BinLaden is destroyed or has been transformed into a horrible new form of life. The immobile pallid face is a waxy mask made from flayed skin of the original BinLaden, and the hidden arm is actually a terrible claw. The precise type of being that he has become is impossible to speculate, beyond the certainty that it is beyond human vocabulary to adequately describe. In these new videos, BinLaden always appears alone as if even his closest allies and supporters could not endure the terrible presence of this spawn of the outer void. Could it be that his elderly ally Ayman Al'Zawahiri glimpsed what lies behind the mask, and died of fear?

It is also worth noting that references to adopting a mask and robe to conceal an inhuman body appear in an evocation of Nyarlathotep by natives of Yuggoth, quoted in The Whisperer In Darkness, and that in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath it is noted that Nyarlathotep has many shapes, but can only take precise human form infrequently.

The Other Gods

One of the most notorious acts of the Taliban was to destroy the Buddha statues of Bamiyan. Though it was claimed that this was an attempt to thwart idolatry, all is not as it might seem. It is very likely that this destruction was undertaken at the behest of Usama BinLaden, whose agenda is that of gods far older and less sane than that of Islam.

It must be understood that the identity of the statues is highly suspect. There were two large guardian Buddhas, with distorted quasi-Chinese features; as many people recollect, Buddha was Indian, and there was only one Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. A strong hint of the eldritch influence over the creation of these stone collossi comes from the fact that the particular emperors which constructed them ruled over the Indian cities of Sarnath and Mathura (which sounds more than a bit like Cathuria.) These were not meant to represent Buddha, but the gods that Barzai espied on Hatheg-Kla before he was snatched up unspeakably by the Other Gods.

Yet Lovecraft himself had interesting things to say about stone collossi, most notably in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In it, Randolph Carter seeks Mount Ngranek to behold a carven visage of one of the terrestrial gods, in order to find the bloodline of those descended from these immortals. These unusual features, including slanted quasi-Chinese eyes and pendulous earlobes lead Carter to the villages surrounding the forbidden plateau of Leng. Unsurprisingly, this leads us to recognize that within what we today call Afghanistan is the plateau of Leng, the Cold Waste, and somewhere in the most forbidding mountainous regions Kadath itself.

Lovecraft also describes stone titans which animate and serve the Gods of Earth by patrolling Leng. It is also worth noting that long before the Taliban utterly destroyed these collossi, their faces were destroyed; perhaps to conceal the bloodline of the gods, perhaps to blind the titans which would periodically reanimate. Yet even that was insufficient; all traces of the Elder Gods and their servants must be destroyed of the Great Old Ones were to return to their rightful place as rulers of mankind.

This leads us to wonder about the sinister reputation of Tora Bora, the "black mountains" of Afghanistan; a place so forbidding that it was reputed that to seek it was certain death. Could it be that Tora Bora is near Kadath? It is no great surprise that few terrorists were retrieved from Tora Bora intact, nor that BinLaden remains missing. Tora Bora is riddled with deep caves, some which surely descend into vast cavernous realms with buried cities built by forgotten races that are not entirely uninhabited

What does tempt speculation is the fate of the various aircraft that have been destroyed, that the US military insists were due to accidents and not due to anti-aircraft guns. The latter part is credible; but if indeed Afghanistan is the home of Leng, could it be that these aircraft collided with winged flesh-eating behemoths that crawled up from unplumbed abysses? You tell me; how would a Black Hawk attack helicopter fare against a shantak?

The Elder Sign

In the light of all this dark constellation of synchronicities, can we afford to ignore the attack on the Pentagon? Ever since the 1960s, this oddly-shaped complex has been half-jokingly rumored to imprison the discarnate spirit of the Great Old One, Yog-Sothoth. Those who remain skeptical, consider this; the attack on the World Trade Center maximized human casualties as well as structural damage, whereas the attack on the Pentagon claimed relatively few lives but maximized the structural damage against the building itself. If indeed Al'Qaida is a front for the servants of the Great Old Ones, it can only mean that they believe that the Pentagon is a prison for their unclean master, The Key And Guardian Of The Gate, Yog Sothoth.

The Innsmouth Look

One of the next targets of the US military are the Abu Sayef militants of the South Philippines, who maintain a seafaring empire of kidnapping and smuggling as a tentacle of Al'Qaida. Abu Sayef are indisputably one of the smaller and less destructive of Al'Qaida factions, which begs the question... why them? The answer may well be found in Lovecraft's writings.

The Southern Philippenes contain one of the few massings of Al'Qaida sympathy in the South Pacific region, and is of the same general ethnic group as the kanakas and native Hawaiians. The kanakas and "half-castes" specifically are cited in The Call of Cthulhu as being the ethnicity of the Cthulhu Cultists who attempted to release the high-priest of the Great Old Ones, from his monstrous tomb at R'lyeh. It is generally well known that the Abu Sayef are to some degree a mix of ethnicities, some of which are difficult to identify. It is also remarked that they are remarkable swimmers. What remains open to question is whether the warriors of the Abu Sayef are this or something far more sinister, not being entirely human at all.

The only logical rationale to pursue the Abu Sayef with such vigor is to prevent them from doing something destructive on a global scale. The recent volcanic activity in the Congo may presage a series of tectonic shifts throughout the South Pacific region. Perhaps the US military knows more than they are letting on, and realize that the Abu Sayef are preparing for the immanent rise of R'lyeh and the release of Cthulhu from his tomb.

The Stars Are Right

On September 11th, Al'Qaida terrorists destroyed the two towers of New York City's World Trade Center, the marketplace of modern man. On January 16th two large asteroids passed very close to Earth, prompting widespread speculations about previous meteoric impacts, including that which may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago. The millennium has passed, yet doom is still on everyones mind. Though it seems as though mankind has skirted the disaster, it almost appears as though the heavens were mimicking our plight here on Earth... almost as if it were a response to a message... a message fueled by three thousand human sacrifices.

The stars are right. Something is coming.

But... what's that sound? A terrible hissing that face at the window look away! The foetor of the ocean floor they have come to take what has been stolen the mother of all worms... iaeeee!

[ The preceding was found among the tattered, ichor-soaked papers of Professor Ephraim Winthrop Clark, late Professor of Blasphemous & Unwholesome Astronomical, Oceanographic, and Ancient Semitic Studies of Kingsport Community College. ]

The preceding is intended entirely as a work of humor. Any literal conclusion derived from it is a strong indication that you need a licensed therapist.